Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

canada.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 204 posts

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#61

Post by squarefoot »

yosito wrote: post #14
squarefoot wrote: post #6

I've stopped using burned CDs and DVDs like 15 years ago, long before they were considered obsolete, after losing a huge amount of data, including multiple backups of projects. All of them were kept in their own case on a wall CD/DVD holder, no weights, no humidity, no excessive heat or any sun exposition. After only about 5 years like 30% of them were unreadable at all and others developed errors, so as soon as I re…

"Hard drives" don't necessarily last any longer than a few years either.

This is also true. Having also lost data on two hard drives kept in a drawer for just over a couple years I can totally confirm that, however it was a isolated incident probably also due to some physical issues in the drives, although they weren't old and SMART would report them as 100% healthy. After those two years both drives were completely dead, not just unreadable; ultimately I could bring one to life again after removing and carefully cleaning the controller pcb; however it still required a complete reformat as the data was gone, while the second remained dead. Now I rotate them so that every few years I copy all data to new disks while keeping the old ones until the next rotation: half of my NAS drives become offline backup disks, the other half I use as spare backup disk (with aggressive spindown etc) in some PCs, so I have both live and offline backups. Data should be safe, hopefully:)

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#63

Post by grishka »

incrudible wrote: post #60
grishka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with cloud storage is that it's a needy thing. You have to pay for it in periodic payments the whole time it exists. And it's also controlled by someone else. I do really wish there to be a type of storage medium that I could record, store somewhere, and forget about. And then when I need it years later, it would still be perfectly readable. Optical discs are indeed kinda that, but their reliability is hi…

Unless you plan on digging a hole in the forest, every type of storage is going to cost some type of upkeep.

But keeping a box of storage media in your closet doesn't cost you anything extra, as opposed to cloud storage.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#64

Post by kikokikokiko »

sergers wrote: post #23
jl6 wrote: post #9

I used to be concerned about optical media longevity. I bought Taiyo-Yuden discs. I checked their integrity. I stored them carefully. But the format became obsolete (for me) long before the media degraded. Recordable discs are just too small for the backup use case I had. Optical drives are still available of course, but they are now rarely standard with a new PC or laptop, and soon will become specialist components,…

I was a fan of the matte white top printable taiyo udens. Back in my sharing early days, I probably had like 1000+ dvds of anime, movies, hk film, games etc easily. I had so much media that I didn't have time to watch it all, let alone watch it again in the future (there are some gems that I actually went out and purchased retail copies). Plus alot of the shit would get released at higher quality making my archive ob…

In my case it was early MMA fights, I was obssessed with martial arts in general, and up to 2007 I literally had a 500+ collection of burned CDs and DVDs, with every single fight from every major promotion in the world, catalogued by date, fighter's involved, styles, results etc. Until someday I realized that I probably would never rewatch any of those fights, I would simply watch the new ones that are happening everyday. Hoarding is hoarding, be it of "real things" be it digital ones. Some time later I gave all of my collection to a BJJ colleague of mine, and I never burned another CD since. Life's too short, and accumulating stuff is just a massive waste of time.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#65

Post by ace2358 »

_int3_ wrote: post #44
mrfinn wrote: post #19

> BD-R (dye or non-dye, single layer or dual layer) 5 to 10 years > BD-R (non-dye, gold metal layer) 10 to 20 years > BD-RE (erasable Blu-ray) 20 to 50 years I find hard to believe that info. Seems to be sustained by a single study. That would mean that bluray (specially the BR-R format) is a pretty flawed technology.

That means first games for PS4 are already damaged.

I’m under the impression that ps4 discs are pressed. This article is about writable media.

Writable media needs a dye or layer that can be ‘burnt’

Commercial disks don’t do this and instead are physically pressed.

The dye material is the one that degrades over time. The pressed material doesn’t.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong?

Commercially pressed discs should last a very long time in comparison

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#66

Post by mpol »

darkwater wrote: post #29

Totally anecdotal but just a month ago I opened a box from my last moving (ended 4 years ago...) and I found a CD-RW labeled "Backup 2001", which survived 5-6 relocations, even an international one. Well, I put it into an USB DVD player I have aaaand, it starts spinning and spinning and spinning, and nothing shows up in Nautilus. Looking at dmesg I see a few I/O errors on the device. Then, I try ddrescue [1], start e…

Even with ddrescue you might lose a few bits. You will only find out when accessing those specific files and bits.

For my photo history I prefer to keep PAR files next to it. On a running mechanical disc I haven't seen issues when running the repair. I do expect to see some errors in the future and as long as it stays under a certain percentage, things will be fixable.

I started doing this long time in the past, when harddisks were awful. I would often lose mp3 files due to damage. With mp3 you can easily hear it. With jpeg images you can often see damage as well.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#67

Post by darkwater »

grishka wrote: post #58
darkwater wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same storage conditions here, probably never over 30C though, but I really never cared for its storage either. Give a try to ddrescue, it's pretty straightforward to use, I just ran it with defaults and it worked pretty well, but it has a ton of parameters if you want. Now I have stored the whole disk image in the cloud (BackBlaze), let see in 2043 if I can still access it!

The problem with cloud storage is that it's a needy thing. You have to pay for it in periodic payments the whole time it exists. And it's also controlled by someone else. I do really wish there to be a type of storage medium that I could record, store somewhere, and forget about. And then when I need it years later, it would still be perfectly readable. Optical discs are indeed kinda that, but their reliability is hi…

I concur, there is no "fire and forget" solution comparable to what a physical medium gives you. And I could have probably avoided the CD-RW corruption by dumping the whole image on a new CD / DVD / USB storage every now and then.

I also have some external magnetic HDD that is now already ~10 years old, stored in the same conditions as the aforementioned CD, let see how it fares in 2032 :)

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#69

Post by midoridensha »

pcf wrote: post #52
sergers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a fan of the matte white top printable taiyo udens. Back in my sharing early days, I probably had like 1000+ dvds of anime, movies, hk film, games etc easily. I had so much media that I didn't have time to watch it all, let alone watch it again in the future (there are some gems that I actually went out and purchased retail copies). Plus alot of the shit would get released at higher quality making my archive ob…

Exactly the same here, except that I gave all those discs to friends. And I shudder to think how much time I wasted on all that archiving, when it ultimately wasn't worth it at all. Now, I'm still doing much of the same, but this time downloading movies, TV series, documentaries etc. via Snahp to my archive on an external HDD. The other day I suddenly had a realisation: Why on earth am I downloading 1080p films to wa…

The problem is that many times, the "originals" (or official sources) become unavailable.

There's a ton of old 80s/90s DOS games and 8-bit games that we still have now because of digital hoarders. If it weren't for them, they'd be lost because the original companies are long gone and most people just trash stuff.

Now look at how much stuff regularly disappears from video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Re: Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (2020)

#70

Post by brazzy »

ace2358 wrote: post #65
_int3_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means first games for PS4 are already damaged.

I’m under the impression that ps4 discs are pressed. This article is about writable media. Writable media needs a dye or layer that can be ‘burnt’ Commercial disks don’t do this and instead are physically pressed. The dye material is the one that degrades over time. The pressed material doesn’t. Someone correct me if I’m wrong? Commercially pressed discs should last a very long time in comparison

Basically correct, with a tiny caveat: there can be manufacturing defects where the reflective aluminum layer of pressed discs is not fully sealed and oxidizes over time.
Post reply on HN